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Ask TUAW: Arabic Mail, playing Wii, calibrating color and more
Wednesday means it is Ask TUAW time! This week we'll look at questions about Arabic support in Mail.app, playing a Wii on a Mac, Digital Color Calibration, problems copying from Firefox and much more. As always, please leave your own comments, and ask more questions for next week either in the comments to this post or using the tip form. Now let's dive right in!
Jesse asks
I do a good bit of photoshop editing on photos that will later than be printed (in my schools yearbook usually). when I'm editing things like saturation of colors, and brightness/contrast, I've noticed a tendency that, while open in ptshp, the photo looks much more saturated and contrast-y than when i open it in preview, or when i print it. any way to do this without one of those expensive monitor calibrator doo-hickeys?
OS X does have a built in color calibration tool. Just go to the Color tab of the Displays Preference Pane in your System Preferences and click on the "Calibrate" button:
This will launch OS X calibration utility which will all you to create a color profile basically by eye-balling certain shapes and colors. It's not nearly as accurate as a color meter of the sort you mention, but it is helpful. Check out this excellent discussion of manual calibration over at ATPM.
Lucky asks
How do I disable "Check spelling as you type" globally? Whenever I relaunch an application, it automatically enables itself back. I often write in another language and I hate to see each word underlined.
Unfortunately, from what I can tell, this is an application specific setting, so there is no global switch. However, it sounds like a bug in some particular application you're using, so I would contact the developer of that application (just as an example, here's a report of the same bug in MarsEdit).
Ben asks
I am interested in getting a component video input into my mac - mainly as I want to attach my Wii to it. Is there any way to do this? Or HDMI? I have an iMac so am unable to use PCI Cards.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to input component video into an iMac in a cost effective way. There is some professional level equipment that may do it, but that's clearly not what you want. Insofar as you just want to play your Wii on your Mac, I would suggest using an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid which we recently reviewed, through its S-Video input. Elgato even advertises its suitability for doing this "with virtually no latency," and since the Wii is not hi def anyway, you won't be losing that much. And besides, it gives you an over-the-air HDTV tuner to boot!
Conor asks
Help! When I try to copy and paste text from webpages in Firefox to Mail.app, it loses all the links and pastes it as plain text. In Safari (which I hate, sorry, personal preference), however, the links are preserved. Is there any way to select and copy a paragraph from a webpage in Firefox without losing the links?
Unfortunately, I think the answer here is no. We've actually posted on this in the past. Basically the problem is that Firefox renders the page using the Gecko engine and when you copy to the clipboard the formatting simply does not come through properly as explained here. I think there's just not really anything you can do, except perhaps to view the HTML source and copy that.
Sven Bocklandt
I'm looking for some help with how to deal with my music videos. I have quite a collection of them, some bought from the iTunes store, most downloaded from other sources.... I can set up a smart folder with some rules to make music videos go in there, but then other video fragments do as well (because iTunes labels every video that's not bought from their music video store as a movie). I'm sure I can manually tag them etc....But the real problem with iTunes is that it's just not good at playing videos. I have a bunch that play great in Quicktime and sort of work in iTunes, but very choppy (that's true for some video podcasts too by the way... why are they worse in iTunes than Quicktime???). And of course they're in a bunch of different formats, some of which iTunes doesn't support....Now, I'd be happy to use iTunes for audio and something else to play my music videos. Front row is fine but you have to manually select and start each video. As far as I know there's no "playlist" support for videos. And Quicktime doesn't do it either. When the video ends, it's done.
Well this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. My first response was just going to be: use VLC. However, then I realized that you're trying to play some DRMed files that you bought from iTunes. That means you have to use iTunes or QuickTime Player. What you really need is support for playlists in QuickTime Player, but unfortunately, it does not have support for playlists. So what to do... Well there are a number of QuickTime playlist utilities, but I could not get any of them to work properly, and besides there is still the problem of getting the videos from your iTunes playlist into QuickTime Player. So here's my suggestion: use a quick and dirty AppleScript from Doug's AppleScripts called Open Video in QT Player. If you select several videos in iTunes, then invoke this script (you have to activate iTunes script menu if it is not already active) a new QuickTime Player window will open for each of the files. I know it's not elegant, but then at least you can go through and hit play, and when it finishes close the window and hit play on the next one. I invite readers to offer their own suggestions here.
Salam asks
I can't seem to figure out how OS X deals with Arabic, some sites work, some don't. Adium displays Arabic text correctly but nothing else really does. I am using Mail.app and this again doesn't seem to know what to do when I get an email in Arabic neither do any of the MS software (Entourage, Word, etc.).
All of OS X's Arabic support is through Unicode. I suspect what is happening is that some of the sites you are wanting to look at are not properly encoded with respect to Unicode and others are. In any case, I found two possibly helpful suggestions. The problems is helpfully explained in this post at macOSXhints. A possible solution with respect to Mail.app is suggested at Hawk Wings, which basically consists of forcing Mail.app to compose in Unicode by writing a hidden preference in the Terminal. Since I don't deal with Arabic at all, I can't really test this, but I hope this helps. Interestingly enough, I also found this post suggesting that Apple is in the process of localizing OS X into Arabic right now. Once that is done, you may have better luck overall.
This information is provided for your entertainment. Neither TUAW nor this author can be held responsible for any problems arising from the use of the information provided here.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
justflie said 10:15AM on 3-28-2007
Ben,
I'm in your exact situation, fast-forwarded a couple of weeks. I, too, have an iMac and a Wii. I bought the EyeTV hybrid and have really enjoyed the experience. I put the Wii sensor bar on top of the iMac and have at it. the 20" screen makes it look quite delicious. It's annoying that we can't have component in, but it still looks great, especially at the distances that you will be playing at away from the screen. And watching sports and stuff in HD (after getting an antenna) isn't so bad either!
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Ahmad said 10:40AM on 3-28-2007
awww... hey, what happened to my question?
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Ben Murray said 10:45AM on 3-28-2007
justflie
I actually jumped the gun a little here and ordered a Hybrid - got it yesterday and tried to set it up before work this morning (last night i had an important meeting with a few bottles of red)
Not had a chance to hook up the Wii but the teeny tiny aerial doesn't seem to be doing too well at getting teevee - despite the fact i live in the centre of london. No aerial so been thinking about getting one of those indoor aerials with boosters.
Why i'm telling you all this i don't know...
Anyway it does seem odd there's no component type eyetv - you would have thought the conversion would be relatively painless...
Ben
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Marcos said 11:20AM on 3-28-2007
Sven,
I also have a nice collection of videos and have run into the limitations in iTunes.
About the smartlist: you can set the meta-tag in the videos to Music Video. You cannot use iTunes to change the video type on multiple videos at once but you can do one by one. Annoying. Or you can use one of Doug's iTunes scripts so you can change the Video Kind on multiple videos at once:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts01.php?page=1#setvideokindofselected
Now your smart playlist can just check the Video Kind.
I have noticed though that iTunes is doesn't seem to follow video playlists... it seems like a bug to me, it is as if it just recognizes a handful of videos as real videos, ignoring the Video Kind.
iTunes also sucks when it comes to multiple diplay support: I'd like to manage my video playlists in my laptop's machine while the videos play on the secondary monitor (or big screen TV). I have found no way to do this.
Nice player is a good player for videos and it does (very limited) playlists. You should check it out.
Hope this helps!
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www.netlingeri.dk said 11:37AM on 3-28-2007
hmmm.. maybe i shot try??
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justflie said 11:44AM on 3-28-2007
Hey Ben.
Yeah, component in would have been nice, but what are you going to do. I'm in the States so I didn't even get an aerial. But I went to Best Buy (gag, I hate them, but didn't want to wait for shipping) and bought a Terk medium-range directional antenna for around $60USD and it works wonderfully. I'm in the middle of Massachusetts and the main HD broadcasts are from Boston about 40+miles away and I get great reception and a surprising amount of stations. Once you beef up your aerial, I'm sure you'll get some great content, especially considering you're in London where I would assume there are numerous HD towers close by. Enjoy!
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Aron Trimble said 11:59AM on 3-28-2007
For the problem Jesse mentioned it could be a little bit more complex....
Photoshop is an image editor that is color space aware. It is possible that the color space of the image is different than that of the output medium. And if the output medium is not color space aware you would need to be sure you change the color space of the image (via a copy, of course) before outputting to that medium.
Because Preview is also color space aware (as is Safari, fyi) it seems weird that it would be different than Photoshop. I do not think, however, that calibrating the monitor is going to work.
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Mark 2000 said 12:05PM on 3-28-2007
Thing is, in the first question he wasn't necessarily asking how to calibrate is machine. He was asking how to get Photoshop's colors to match his other software. I'd still like the answer to this.
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Mohamed A. Milyani said 12:11PM on 3-28-2007
For Arabic support
Arabic Windows 1256 is suported by Mac OS X , also you can veiw messege in Arabic Windws 1256 ... to do that all what you need is to Add Arabic lang from systemprefrences then International after that choose edit list ... choose Arabic , put Arabic as seconde lang ... then restart Mail ... you will see in messege > texet encoding > Arabic Windows 1256 , Arabic MAC ...
even with Safari ... from view > text encoding > Arabic Windows or UTF-8 depend on the site u visit ....
MS dose not support Arabic exept Excel dose ...
if you are facing some problem with Arabic Font on Safari Plz visit this page on my Blog http://www.milyani.com/arabic/milyani/2006/06/29/70/
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john said 12:18PM on 3-28-2007
do NOT use the eyetv hybrid for gaming. it DOES have latency issues admitted in their support site. playing halo on it running through an xbox was UNPLAYABLE. not to mention, it doesn't support any type of hd resolutions, just over the air hd tv.
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darren said 12:40PM on 3-28-2007
i used a friends wii with my eye tv hybrid a while back. didnt do much testing with it though as we got distracted with other stuff, but it played fine. a wii/hybrid combo isnt something i would recommend as a long term solution - but for messing about its fine.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dw/359908382/
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Marcos said 12:43PM on 3-28-2007
Sven,
I also have a nice collection of videos and have run into the limitations in iTunes.
About the smartlist: you can set the meta-tag in the videos to Music Video. You cannot use iTunes to change the video type on multiple videos at once but you can do one by one. Annoying. Or you can use one of Doug's iTunes scripts so you can change the Video Kind on multiple videos at once:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts01.php?page=1#setvideokindofselected
Now your smart playlist can just check the Video Kind.
I have noticed though that iTunes is doesn't seem to follow video playlists... it seems like a bug to me, it is as if it just recognizes a handful of videos as real videos, ignoring the Video Kind.
iTunes also sucks when it comes to multiple diplay support: I'd like to manage my video playlists in my laptop's machine while the videos play on the secondary monitor (or big screen TV). I have found no way to do this.
Nice player is a good player for videos and it does (very limited) playlists. You should check it out.
Hope this helps!
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AS said 12:56PM on 3-28-2007
For the Arabic problem, it might be a problem with the Arial and Times New Roman fonts installed by MS Office. Here's what you do. As a prior post noted, activate the Arabic fonts in "International" in System Preferences; by default they're already installed. You then need to go to Font Book and disable the active versions of Times New Roman and Arial (the active ones are the ones Office installed); if you want to keep using these fonts, activate the dupes, as they are the original that OS X installed. This fixes the ligatures problem in Safari (i.e., Safari will now correctly display Arabic letters--perhaps this is the reason you don't like Safari; personally I like it very much). That's what the MS Office fonts do; they break Arabic ligatures so that letters always display as separate letters rather than connected text as they're supposed to be in Arabic. Finally, having chosen Arabic from your language chooser in the Menu Bar, go to Mail. I find that I don't even need to choose Unicode manually; Mail does a fine job when it's on Automatic. The only thing you should do is go to "Format", "Alignment", and then "Writing Direction", and then choose "Right to Left" so the cursor can work properly. Tiger, while not localizing Arabic, actually handles the language perfectly fine. The key thing here is disabling the Arial and Times New Roman fonts that MS Office installed on your computer and (if you want to keep using these fonts) activating the original ones that came with OS X. I hope this helps.
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Sven Bocklandt said 1:54PM on 3-28-2007
Marcos,
NicePlayer doesn't play the iTunes DRM'd videos from the store, but everything else works great... and the playlist support is all I need. Thanks!
Sven
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D said 2:20PM on 3-28-2007
Jesse:
About the photoshop question.. I know exactly what you mean. What you need to do is go to View>Proof Colors. The reason you see everything as desaturated is that you're not working in the correct colour space. When you save a file, especially as JPEG or PNG which does not embed the current colour profile, you're going to end up with incorrect colours.
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TwisterMc said 2:32PM on 3-28-2007
Conor - Use Thunderbird. Then you'll keep all formatting. It's not a clipboard issue, it's an issue of Gecko and WebKit (HTML vs Rich Text)
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Zef Houssney said 3:00PM on 3-28-2007
Thanks for the post about Arabic on OS X... I don't get to see much on that. I love that OS X has Arabic fonts and all that built-in, but I wish it was better. For instance, you can't delete any characters in within a line, so you have to start over if you want to change something.The cursor is never in the correct place, it is always at the front or the back of the line (remember, Arabic script reads from right to left), and regardless of its position it always adds to or deletes from the last character, no OS X text editors deal with this correctly (to my knowledge), but it's still great that it is a built-in feature and no extra installation is necessary. If anyone knows about any good Arabic stuff for the Mac please post it here!
Thanks....
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jon stieglitz said 3:30PM on 3-28-2007
Whenever I click on the video icon in ichat to start a video chat, ichat starts one with the buddy one below the one i clicked. Any ideas
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Aaron Bennett said 5:08PM on 3-28-2007
Jesse-
There's a few things you need to keep in mind when you are editing with Photoshop. The main problem here is your colorspaces, both from the camera, on the monitor, and in photoshop. But by all means, do the calibration that Mat suggested.
Here is my advice (I'm an amateur photographer, see http://www.aaronbennett.com )
1. Set your mac to gamma 2.2. Its asked when you calibrate your display.
2. Calibrate! If you can, borrow a EyeOne or even buy it if you plan to continue processing images for print or posting.
3. Make sure you take images in a good color space, or if you already have the images (or don't have the luxury of changing the way you take photos) make sure photoshop is opening the right color space. For instance, take in AdobeRGB for a nice wide gamut of colors.
4. Use the tools in photoshop to open color space, convert to a color space or set your default working space. These are Edit > Color Settings..., Edit > Assign Profile..., and Edit > Convert to Profile... Play around with those for obvious color changes.
5. Export to the color profile that will be used. Your yearbook may be printed in CMYK which natively has a larger gamut than RGB. For outputting to the web, use sRGB. When the images are opened in Safari or Firefox, they show the colors you intended.
6. You can install more color profiles, for instance many Costco photo printers have installable profiles that you can use with photoshop to get an accurate representation of the final printed colors - See if anything is available from the printers of your yearbook.
HTH! -Aaron
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Keaton said 5:58PM on 3-28-2007
jesse-
another thing to watch for is making sure in photoshop if you're working on something for the computer (web images, etc) you need to be working in RGB color. if you're working in CYMK, which is for printing, your colors will be off when exported to other applications or when posted online. every time you open a new project, in the image size window it asks you which format to put it in.
hope this helps!
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